Documents / Hearing transcript
This is the printed transcript of an April 5, 1966 hearing of the U.S. House Committee on Armed Services on unidentified flying objects. Air Force Secretary Harold Brown testified that 9,501 of 10,147 sightings from 1947 through 1965 had been identified and that no threat or extraterrestrial evidence had been found. The record includes the Scientific Advisory Board ad hoc committee report recommending university studies and the Air Force's marsh gas explanation for the Dexter and Hillsdale, Michigan sightings. Members also questioned J. Allen Hynek and Maj. Hector Quintanilla about the Exeter, New Hampshire case.
6043 Dr. HYNEK. It is, I believe, to the best of my knowledge, listed as unidentified. Mr. BATES. This one is still unidentified? Dr. HYNEK. Yes, sir. The CHAIRMAN. In other words, you make no bones about it, you cannot explain it? Dr. HYNEK. That is correct. The CHAIRMAN. Yes. Mr. BATES. I wonder if you would give us some idea of these 20 cases that you have cited, and tell us a little something about the nature of these cases, and what the problems are, generally? Dr. HYNEK. Well, I do not have the case files with me. I should be happy to prepare them for submission. But in broad description, they vary quite a bit. They are either daytime sightings or night- time sightings. I will describe one, which may not be necessarily typical. But it is an example of a sighting that puzzled some very solid citizens. These individuals happened to be—and I will with- hold names,of course—two students of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin. They were with two other people in a car, returning home one evening from shopping, about 9 p.m. In the distance they saw what they first took to be rotating blinker lights on a police car, and they thought there had been an accident down the road some place. They then decided that this couldn't be the case because the lights were a little too high. This illustrates the sort of thing we refer to as escalation of explanation. When someone writes in or calls in that they have seen a space ship patrolling the earth, and this is not a fact, this is an interpretation of a fact, usually, what they have actually seen was a light, I am much more interested in the sincere individuals who report some- thing, who say "I thought at first it was this, then I decided it couldn't be that, it had to be something else." In this escalation hypothesis, the incident I have described, these people said it could not have been blinker lights on a police car because they were too high. The next hypothesis was that it was an aircraft about to crash. As the object came closer all they could see were four huge red lights and an even larger brighter single white light. As it came closer to the car—the little 12-year-old girl in the back seat, became so frightened that she just tumbled over and hid her eyes. I questioned these people for some 2 hours. They were very intelli- gent people and were truly puzzled. They did not for a moment think they were being visited by a vehicle from outer space. They were just puzzled. They simply wanted an explanation of what they had seen. The object apparently extended upward at an angle of about 30 degrees, so that part of it could be seen above the telephone wires and part below. It hovered around the car for awhile. The man drove into a farmer's driveway, turned his lights out and listened, but could hear no noise. He backed out and as the object began to move away, he gave chase but could not catch up with it. This was a case of four intelligent people seeing this strange object and reporting it. But no one else did. Why not? Was this some sort of a strange phychic projection, or something these people were particularly prone to? Why did this take place in an area which was
Hearing transcript, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 88 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.